“I think it snagged a few hairs. From my head, I mean, not my chest …” I trailed off, because one of the girls hurrying along with us was giving me a strange look. I blinked, momentarily stumbling over my own feet as something else occurred to me. “Dammit. Boobs, Emmy. I can’t pretend to be a guy. What about my boobs? Or is it rude to mention that a guy has boobs, clear as the sun, standing right there—”
“Will!” Emmy was catching my arm every few steps now, because I couldn’t seem to keep my footing with all the excitement. And by excitement, I definitely meant terror. “Can you stop talking about boobs, please? We’re getting weird looks.”
“Oh yeah,” I drawled, “change the subject. Real smooth, Emmy, real smooth.”
She rumbled with that chilling, forest-cat growl again, making me shut up. Okay, so maybe she was right. I couldn’t change the dorm assignment, but maybe the sols would request a change themselves, after discovering that I was a girl?
“And this is the dining hall,” Henchman Number Two announced to the group, pushing two heavy doors apart to give us a glimpse into a massive hall with floor-to-ceiling windows and heavy, velvet curtains. There were bronze chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, with so many candles stuck into their brackets that I was sure they had to be a hazard of some kind. Most likely the fire kind. Dozens and dozens of circular wooden tables were spaced apart around the room, with a long bar of empty aluminium dishes stretching along one wall, a kitchen area barely visible behind it.
“The final prep-kitchen is on this level, allowing the sols to request certain dishes outside of the set menu each mealtime, but most of the work is done below, in the basement kitchens. No recruits are allowed in the basement-kitchen. Resident dwellers only.”
He backed away from the doors, letting them fall shut, and then proceeded to drag our group from one end of the academy grounds to the other. We also toured the female dormitories and the bathing chambers attached to the ends of each dormitory corridor. I could only pray to the gods that the male dormitories were set up in a similar way, but that was kind of futile … because the gods had allowed me to get assigned to the male dorm in the first place.
Correction: they didn’t really allow it, so much as they just never paid any damn attention to me in the first place.
I mean, I got it, I did. I wasn’t that important. I was just a little dirt-dweller with a little Danger! sign hovering over my head. Why would the gods bother to watch over me, unless it was for entertainment?
Oh my gods …
“Emmy!” I bounced up from her bed—the one we had collapsed against as Henchman Number Two allowed us a short break after the touring. “Do you think they do it deliberately?”
“Who?” She blinked, her head snapping up, her eyes flying open. She had fallen asleep, apparently. She jumped up with me, finding her feet, her eyes darting about wildly. “What? Who?”
“The gods!”
“The gods what?”
“Do you think they do this crap to me deliberately? All the accidents?”
Emmy groaned, her posture deflating as she sank back onto the bed, her hand wiping down her face. “Dammit, Will … of course they don’t do it deliberately. Why the hell would they do that?”
“Well they’re supposed to love the sols fighting against each other; that’s why they come down to the arena every moon-cycle to watch them battle, right? So … what if they’re making my life hell just to laugh about it?”
She sighed again, but this time it was a pity sigh. She grabbed my hands, pulling me down onto the bed beside her. “Will … just stop thinking about it, okay? It is what it is. We can’t change it, so we need to live with it. I know this whole …” she shook her hand around, indicating the stone walls surrounding us, “situation has shaken you up a bit, but the gods definitely aren’t making you clumsy just to amuse themselves. If they really wanted that kind of entertainment, they’d be doing it to the sols. We’re just dwellers. It’d be like poking ants just to see them scatter. It’s really not that entertaining. Certainly not for eighteen life-cycles on end.”
I opened my mouth to answer—probably to say that she could call herself an ant, if she really wanted to, but I was totally an eagle, or basically anything cooler than an ant—but I wasn’t afforded the chance, because the bells were ringing again.